The Happy Planet Index (HPI) is the world’s leading measure of sustainable wellbeing. It is calculated from three components: average life expectancy, self-reported wellbeing, and ecological footprint. The latest edition, released today by the Hot or Cool Institute, reveals that, while no country has yet achieved a fully sustainable “Good … [continued]
Ever since Trump 2.0 ascended the golden staircase to the White House, clean energy has been boo’d, discredited, and denied. Individuals with conservative, closely-held cultural models and domains have spread renewable energy misinformation, sometimes without malice and often without enough prior knowledge to question clean energy controversies spread daily in … [continued]
When I was an early stage doctoral student, our professor asked each of us to turn to someone in the room and explain our upcoming dissertation idea. Whoa! That was tough, as our colleagues didn’t necessarily share our disciplinary background knowledge nor the jargon that we took for granted in … [continued]
Is Gen Z attentive to climate issues and motivated to do their part to have a net zero future? Yes, definitely. In fact, climate concern is widespread among youth, but their climate experience is defined by anxiety, not intensity. They are increasingly cautious and less self-assured in their ability to … [continued]
TL;DR: Fossil narratives are collapsing. Economics, physics, and real-world deployment all now point one way: solar + storage. For several decades now, the fossil lobby has followed the renewable sector like a bad debt — constantly painting molehills as mountains, inventing false comparisons, and trying to derail public understanding any … [continued]
The US has an energy storage problem, and it’s a big one: energy storage might not even exist! The Interior Secretary, for example, doubts that it exists. The Energy Secretary has raised similar existential concerns, and the EPA Administrator reminds everyone that even if they do exist, batteries cost money. … [continued]
The fossil fuel industry is in a panic about renewable energy and is resorting to every dirty trick it can find to protect its profits.
Chatgpt generated: Economic and operational contrast between molten salt storage and simpler, lower cost solid storage systems
Molten salt has long been positioned as the workhorse of high temperature thermal storage. Its story began with research in the 1980s and early deployment in Spanish parabolic trough plants in the 2000s. The technology was appealing on paper. A mixture of sodium and potassium nitrate has a high heat … [continued]
Chatgpt generated: Split scene showing abandoned CSP mirrors in the desert on one side and vast PV farms with batteries on the other, symbolizing the energy transition
Ivanpah was supposed to be the future. When it opened in the Mojave Desert in 2014, with its three towers glowing like beacons and almost 400 MW of capacity, it was the largest concentrated solar power plant in the world. It had the backing of Google, NRG Energy, BrightSource, and … [continued]
Sunrun and Ford are running a potentially game changing, first-of-its-kind vehicle-to-home energy storage experiment, leveraging the powerful battery of the Ford F-150 Lightning electric pickup truck. Image courtesy of Ford.
Ford, Sunrun and the utility BGE have demonstrated that EV owners can earn incentives by hooking up to a distributed power plant, helping to offset the loss of the $7,500 federal tax credit.
